Chapter Text
She’s 10 years old, and dreaming of a king of demons staring her down on horseback.
She’s 17, fleeing a once bustling town now filled with undead, piloting a body that barely feels like hers.
She’s 10, being strangled in a bloody dungeon underneath the peaceful facade of Kakariko village.
She’s 17, staring down a beast that radiates with the power of the triforce as it towers over her, certain she’s going to die.
She’s 10, leaving the kingdom that almost killed her dozens of times.
She’s 10, in a twisted realm of masks, once again at the helm of a strange and unfamiliar body.
She’s 10, and the moon is falling on her.
She’s 10 and the moon is falling on her.
She’s 10 and the moon is falling on her she’s 10 and the moon is falling on her she’s 10 and the moon is falling on her she turns 11 and the moon is falling on her and the moon is falling on her and the moon is falling on her and the moon is falling on her and
She’s 10 and she’s 11 and she’s 17 all at once, falling to her knees in the fog of the lost woods. Her breath comes ragged and stuttering as her eyes blur with tears. She’s kokiri and she’s hylian and she’s a grown man and she’s a deku and she’s a goron and she’s a zora and the moon is falling on her, and her memories of the past months split over so many bodies and chronologies they threaten to make her mind splinter.
Her fingers tighten around the smooth blue surface of the ocarina, and she slams it down onto a rock with a shout. It splinters, a spiderweb-thin crack spreading an inch across the impact site, and a choked sob rises from Link’s throat. She cradles it to her chest, holding it tight against her, and cries quietly on the bed of leaves and sticks on the forest floor.
“Link?” Someone calls. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t know how long she’s been lying there. She doesn’t know if it matters. “Link!”
The sound of hoofbeats at a medium trot accompanies the voice, slowing as they approach her prone form. A distant, battle-hardened part of her screams at her to get up and draw her sword, but the past three days have over and over sapped any drive she once had for it. She saved two worlds already, whatever’s going to happen can go ahead and happen at this point.
Whoever the rider is doesn’t seem intent on harming her, though, instead crouching down next to her and lifting her cap so she can see Link’s face. It’s Romani, still alert and alive, but if Link doesn’t do something quickly the ghosts will come to take her Malon, forehead creased with concern as she looks down and Link and Link looks dully back up at her. “Are you alive, fairy boy?”
Link nods once, dead leaves and itchy grass brushing against her cheek.
“That’s a relief. Epona came running all the way back to the ranch and she seemed really spooked, and she wouldn’t come down until I rode out here with her to see what happened. She must’ve been worried about you.” Malon reaches out, and brushes a tear off Link’s cheek with her thumb. “And now I think I’m worried about you, too. What happened?”
“I,” she starts. Her voice comes out raw and scratchy. She doesn’t continue.
“Can you stand?” She offers a hand to Link.
Link lies there for a moment, unmoving, but Malon doesn’t waver until Link finally reaches out and lets her help her up. Malon’s hand is warm, her grip stronger than Link would’ve expected.
“C’mon,” she beckons. “My dad gets worried if I’m out past sundown.”
Because after sundown the ghosts come to the ranch to take her away, and the next morning she’s sitting there with blank eyes and saying things that don’t make any sense, and—
Link shakes her head, shoving the memories away, and climbs up onto Epona to sit behind Malon.
# # #
“So does he just live here now?” Ingo asks, as if Link isn’t pulling water up from the well don’t think about what’s down there only a few feet away.
Talon shrugs. “It was important to Malon. Sides, he certainly pulls his weight. He’s plenty strong, and the animals like him.”
Ingo mutters something about who is or isn’t pulling their weight, which Talon pretends not to hear.
She’s been living on the ranch for two weeks now, doing any chores Talon will give her. Mucking the stables is far from pleasant, but she’d do it ten thousand times over before crawling through another dungeon to kill whatever horrid monster lurks within.
“He doesn’t talk much,” Ingo continues. “Is he slow or something?”
Talon shrugs again. “Hardly think it matters.”
“He can hear you,” Malon scowls, having just arrived from the house. “Wash up and come on in, I made lunch.”
Link and Malon bring their food to eat outside, while the men bicker over lunch in the kitchen. Rather, Malon eats her food, while Link has a few slow bites and stares at it.
“You’ve got to eat up, fairy boy,” Malon urges. “Don’t you like it?”
“It’s good,” she says, and it is. “Not really hungry.”
Malon scoffs. “You’ve been toiling away since sunrise. If you don’t eat, you’ll waste away to nothing.”
She thinks about the body she left the sacred realm in, tall and broad-shouldered and hairy. The face that looked back in her reflection was hard and angular. Wasting away doesn’t seem so bad if that’s the alternative waiting for her.
She finishes her lunch.
# # #
Link accompanies Malon and Talon into castle town, keeping her head down and hands stuffed in her pockets. It’s Malon’s 11th birthday making Link both older and younger than her and she’s led them to a tailor to look for a new dress. Last time Link was in this part of Hyrule, she’d returned the master sword to the pedestal for the final time and left to deliver proof of Ganondorf’s treason to the royal family. At the time, she had vague thoughts of having some kind of life here, after she reunited with Navi and…
She wasn’t sure what. She assumed there was something heroes were supposed to do after a grand quest, but if there was, she hadn’t found it.
Malon stands at the window, distracted from her shopping by commotion outside. A pair of knights stand confronting a trio of Gerudo women, angry shouting from both fronts vaguely audible through the glass. Link feels her stomach drop, certain that a fight or worse might break out. She wants to turn Malon away from the window, stop her from having to see whatever might happen.
After a few painfully tense moments, the knights escort the women away from the center of town. Link can’t see what happens next, if anything does. “Gosh,” Malon says, sighing out the anxiety she was holding.
“Don’t you worry about that,” Talon says, ruffling her hair. “You heard about what their king was up to. The knights are just trying to keep the town safe.”
Link thinks about Nabooru locked inside the armor of an Iron Knuckle, forced to obey Twinrova’s bidding for years in Gerudo town, plotting against Ganondorf from the very beginning, and all the other Gerudo she saw in the valley. Surely they couldn’t all have supported Ganondorf’s plan. Some of them even lived in castle town driven out with everyone else after it was filled with the undead peacefully alongside Hylians and Zora.
The building across the street is abandoned. Link is fairly sure it was a Gerudo-owned tavern last time she was here.
“Ooh, fairy boy,” Malon snaps her attention away from the window. “Wouldn’t you look great in this?”
She’s holding out a dress the same vibrant green shade as the tunic Link left Kokiri forest with, the brilliant monochrome almost shockingly out of place alongside the usual style of the castle town. Malon’s expression is teasing, but Link suddenly imagines herself wearing the dress, soft and flowy compared to that utilitarian tunic.
“Whoa, no need to get embarrassed,” she grins, putting the dress back. Link almost wants to ask her not to, but her throat closes up around the words.
When she settles on the style she likes, the tailor takes her measurements and puts pins in the dress so she can see how it’ll look once it’s altered. The tailor is a much older woman, all grey hair and wrinkles, and Link watches Malon beam at how she fusses over her and calls her “young lady”.
The tailor tells Talon it’ll be ready in a week, and Malon nearly leaps in excitement. Talon lets out a low whistle when he hears the price, but pulls a bag of rupees out of his pocket to pay her. “You oughta thank your friend there,” he tells Malon. “Might not have this kind of money to spend if he wasn’t helping out.”
Malon nearly bowls Link over when she throws her arms around her in an enthusiastic hug. She’s stunned for a moment, but awkwardly hugs her back.
“When’s your birthday, fairy boy?”
Link shrugs. Even if she knew it, it would hardly be a good benchmark of how old she is. She’s 11 in a 10 year old body that’s already seen 17.
“Hm. We’ll have to make one up for you.”
“Okay,” she says. She doesn’t know if she particularly wants a birthday. Both masks and time have twisted her body far away from her control and her desire. If she were born Kokiri, she’d probably stay like this forever.
But she’s Hylian, doomed to ultimately grow into the stranger she’d been when she stepped out of the sacred realm.
# # #
On one night when she’s 11 and maybe also 12, her eyes snap open from another one of her nightmares. Sometimes Malon notices her twisting in her sleep, or hears her muttering under her breath. Those nights, she’ll shake her awake, and Link will jolt upright or grab her wrist in a panic, but then she’ll catch her breath and slowly start to calm down.
Other nights, she has to wait until her mind can’t bear its own creation any longer, and she wakes up panicked and covered in sweat. The moonlight falling on her falling on her falling on her is just barely bright enough to illuminate the room, and the echoes of her latest nightmare hang about her like fog. She looks over to Malon’s bed on instinct, expecting to see the blankets pulled up over her shoulders and hear the comforting rhythm of her breathing, but
The roof is torn off the barn and the ghosts are floating away with the cows and Romani along with them
the bed is empty she’s screaming as she’s carried up into that bright light in the sky , the blankets pulled back towards the foot of the bed tomorrow she’s not going to remember anything.
Link bolts to her feet and sprints out of the house, fleeing out onto the ranch with only a kitchen knife to protect herself with. The night sky is clear tonight, only a few sparse clouds in between the endless ocean of stars, and Link looks left and right for any ghosts or monsters as she bolts across the field, certain there will be one just around the corner.
It takes her a moment to realize that someone’s singing, soft notes flowing through the night they’re going to find Romani she has to hide , and she pauses to catch her breath if Link stops too long they’ll get her and figure out where the sound is coming from.
She runs up the hill, knife clutched in her hand, listening to the singing growing louder until eventually she sees Romani wandering the ranch lost and confused Malon, facing out to look over Hyrule field. Her silky hair catches the moonlight it’s going to crush them both , and her dress flutters in the breeze.
“Malon,” Link says, forcing the word out through her frozen throat and jaw. Malon turns, hardly seeming surprised that she was interrupted, and gives Link a crooked smile.
“Hey, fairy boy.” She raises an eyebrow when she sees the knife in her hand. “You here to murder me?”
She wants to explain, the words hover in her lungs waiting to be pushed out, but she can’t seem to make her mouth work. All she can do is shake her head, knife held limply at her side.
“That’s a relief. You’d ruin my dress, and my dad would probably kick you out.”
Fortunately, there’s no memory of Malon or Romani or Cremia’s actual death in some other timeline for her mind to yank up to the forefront of her awareness. The thought still makes her jaw clench shut, the prospect of speaking growing even further away.
“Come sit with me,” Malon beckons, and kneels down to sit on the grass. Link hesitates, but then joins her on the ground, feeling the cool grass through her nightclothes. “Do you sing?”
Link shakes her head.
“Do you want to listen to me sing?”
She nods.
Malon leans her head on Link’s shoulder, making her stiffen, but Malon doesn’t seem to notice. She sings softly, that same melody she taught Link to play on Ocarina the year before last, and Link’s heartbeat slowly starts to calm.
# # #
She’s nearing 14 or months beyond it, and while Malon’s stayed an inch or two taller than her over the past years Link is starting to catch up. Her voice is scratchy and cracks more often, the first sign of the fate she glimpsed of her body looming on the horizon. All she can do is try not to think about it.
Talon is out for the day, and Malon accompanies Link in cleaning the house while Ingo tends to the horses. They wipe down the kitchen, the division of chores completely routine to them by now, and even as Malon complains about how little she wants to work in the heat, Link enjoys the satisfaction of seeing the house slowly become clean under their practiced hands.
“Ugh, finally,” Malon says, tossing a rag onto the table with a huff. She stretches out her arms and back, takes a deep swig of water, then turns to Link. “C’mon, let’s go back to our room.”
Link follows her back to the room she’s been staying in that she hasn’t fully been able to internalize as ‘her room’. Her room was a treehouse hidden deep in the forest, not a corner of a house on a ranch. Both Ingo and Talon have made comments recently about how they’d have to stop sharing a room because they’re ‘getting to that age’. Malon rolled her eyes at it, and Link felt sick to her stomach.
Malon shuts the door behind them, then turns around to face Link with unusual intensity. Link, two seconds away from collapsing on her bed, pauses uncertainly under her gaze. “I don’t really know how to ask this,” she starts, eyebrows knit together as she studies Link. “I’ve just been noticing some stuff, and maybe I’m wrong, so just don’t get upset, okay?”
“Okay,” Link agrees immediately, but her mouth feels dry. She can’t read the look on Malon’s face, and her heart thumps as she watches Malon walk across the room and waits for the question to come.
She retrieves one of her dresses, a beautiful sky blue garment that was too long on her until a few months ago, and holds it awkwardly in her arms. “Do you want to try this on?”
“Huh?” Link asks, caught entirely off guard.
“It doesn’t have to be this one,” she says, but awkwardly proffers it to Link all the same. “I’ve seen you looking at them, when we’re at the shop and stuff, and even though boys don’t usually wear dresses you still can! If you want.”
Link’s quiet for a moment, struggling to comprehend what she’s saying. Her nervous smile quickly fades to panic, evidently interpreting Link’s dumbstruck silence as offense.
“Or you don’t have to!” she backpedals, words spilling out like water from a toppled jug. She pulls the dress closer to herself defensively. “I just thought, um, I, I must have misunderstood! I didn’t mean—”
“Do you really not mind?” Link asks, her silence breaking as she realizes the chance is slipping away. Then it’s Malon’s turn to fall into silence and stare at Link, wheels turning in her own head.
“N-no, not at all! If it’s what you want.” She offers the garment to Link, who hesitantly accepts it. There’s a small, bashful smile on Malon’s face that Link spends a little too long trying to decipher. “I’ll, uh, turn around. Give you some privacy.”
Malon turns around, and Link turns down to stare at the dress. It’s a simple garment, nothing like the complicated dress she saw the princess wearing or the elaborate gowns that were in style among the Gerudo. All she has to do is slip it over her head and let the fabric drape down to her ankles. Still, she pauses.
She was here at the ranch after drawing the sword, meeting Malon again seven years later. Ingo had sold out to Ganondorf, sparing the ranch from the worst of his invasion, but so close to Castle Town she’d surely heard worse and worse news each month. Still, she went outside at night and sang, still, she could summon that smile that made her eyes shine. She smiled at Link, elated to see her after so long, and it felt strange to find herself smiling back.
Link changes quickly once she summons the courage to start, discarding her tunic and trousers, and pulls the dress on over her underclothes. She realizes it’s on backwards, and pulls her arms through the sleeves to turn it around without having to take it back off.
Malon still stands facing the wall, waiting patiently, and Link turns to look at herself in the mirror. Their bodies haven’t quite diverged yet, both their chests consist more of muscle than anything else after growing up doing hard work on the ranch, and it’s only a little tight about her shoulders. It reaches just down to her ankles, long enough to swish about when she moves her hips.
“Okay,” Link says, stiffly turning around to face her. She waits for Malon to turn around and struggle to hide the amusement on her face, or for disappointment to fall over her features when she realizes that Link still looks like Link, just in a dress.
Instead, she lets out something that sounds almost like a squeal, and bounces up and down on her toes. “It looks so cute on you!” she gushes, and bounds over to stand next to her so they can look into the mirror together. “I know you like green, but doesn’t the blue look so good?”
She can only nod, her words once again getting tangled up in her throat. Malon continues, long since used to not getting a proper answer.
“I really like this one, but if you want, maybe I can give you one of my other ones as a birthday present? I know you don’t know the day, but if it would be in the next few months, right? Or I’m sure you have some money saved up since you never really buy anything. We can go into Castle Town and buy one for you!”
Link doesn’t step in, instead staring into the mirror as she listens to Malon’s excited chatter, and wonders what it might be like if it really were two girls looking back at her.
# # #
The grass tickles the back of Link’s neck and arms as she lies in the field with Malon, staring up at the fluffy clouds that sail across the brilliant blue sky. They were looking for shapes in them, but after Malon identified five of them in a row to be sheep, she declared that the sky wasn’t being very creative today and resigned in protest.
Link thinks one of them looks like Gohma, the first of many monsters to almost kill her, but keeps it to herself.
Malon rolls onto her side to face Link, blue eyes peering at her over blades of grass. “Are you happy here?”
She shrugs. “It’s a nice break.” She knows that’s not what Malon meant.
“That’s not what I meant.” Malon huffs. A lock of auburn hair falls in front of her face, just as shiny as ever. “On the ranch. I kinda assumed you were, because you’re free to go somewhere else whenever, but you’ve still stayed to work and live with us. But you never really seem happy.” Her eyes drift from Link on the last word, focusing on an ant crawling up the grass.
Link doesn’t answer for a while. She’s had moments of happiness since she left the forest, as an adult and in Termina, and certainly on the ranch with Malon and her family. But a happy life , serene and at peace? Outside of the forest, she’s not even sure what it would look like.
A pang of grief hits when she thinks about her life with the Kokiri. She misses them, misses the simple life she had as a child. Misses the vast, placid future that stretched out ahead of the forest children, snatched away from her by a simple circumstance of her birth.
The clouds above her go fuzzy at the edges, and when she tries to blink them back to normal, a hot tear runs down the side of her face and into her hair. She sniffs, wipes at her nose, and feels another tear fall.
“Hey.” Malon’s voice is soft. She reaches out, and her callused hand lands on Link’s wrist. “What’s wrong?”
Link doesn’t know what’s wrong. Malon tugs on her wrist, and Link turns so she’s looking again into her earnest face.
“I didn’t mean to make you sad,” she says, regretful. “You’re my only real friend here, except for the animals, but if you’d be happier somewhere else…”
The forest. It’s only the forest, but she’s grown up now and won’t ever step foot in the forest again. She shakes her head in reply, tears coming faster now as the weight of her future settles over her.
She’s 11 and the moon is falling on her. She plays her ocarina, throwing herself three days back into the past, every effort she made over the last miserable 72 hours erased. The scar she earned under her eye fades to nothing, the fracture in her leg mending itself better than any medicine could. Even her exhaustion rolls out of her like a receding tide, her tiny body perfectly preserved as her mind struggles under the weight of the moonfall.
It’s been months here, and only three days all at once. She struggles onwards, trying to find what series of trials she can overcome to make the moon stop. There’s no energy left in her brain to think about what could happen after. ‘After’ barely feels real anymore.
Malon pulls her into an awkward horizontal hug, and Link’s head ends up resting against her sternum. Another pair of hot tears falls, soaking into the fabric, she’s 13 and the moon is still falling on her.
“I’m sorry, Link,” she murmurs. She’s been calling her ‘fairy boy’ less and less often, and while the disappearance of the nickname makes her feel hollow, deep down she knows being called ‘fairy boy’ would only make her cry harder.
# # #
She spills her heart to Malon under a full moon before an autumn morning, after waking up from a nightmare where she was whispering Romani, Romani, over and over. Malon already knew bits and pieces of her time traveling across Hyrule, believed Link when she told her she met her in the future under Ganondorf’s rule, but all she knows of her second adventure was that Link was in a place called Termina and refused to talk about what happened.
But tonight she does, letting the adrenaline of her recurring nightmare force the floodgates open. She tells Malon about the moon falling on her over and over, about donning masks that twisted her body into different shapes. About meeting a girl who looked just like her on a ranch who’d be abducted every loop unless Link could save her, and the nightmares about it she’s had ever since.
Majora hovers before her, soulless eyes staring down at Link’s kneeling form. Its tendrils left a burning mark on Link’s arm, the only scar she has to prove to herself the fight was real, and the pain is so bad she can hardly make her fingers close around her sword.
The story comes out in fits and starts, her voice giving up in the middle of sentences and forcing her to wait and try to calm down before she can continue. Malon waits patiently, putting a hand on her shoulder or rubbing her back to soothe her as Link rocks herself forward and back in agitation. When she can’t speak anymore, Malon lets her ink the rest of her story on parchment.
She screams when she dons the fierce deity mask. Again, her body is too small to contain its power, so it forces her once more into the shape of a hulking swordsman. It hurts for only a moment, though, before the numbness she’d adopted near the end of her last journey settles over her.
Majora strikes her body over and over during the fight, and Link trades blows with it rather than blocking or sidestepping. This wasn’t her body. What did she care how broken she let it get?
Link writes about fleeing a collapsing castle with the princess, about Ganondorf taking the triforce and transforming. About how certain she felt that she’d die. Her words start to fail here too, her body becoming tight with the effort of recounting, and she feels herself on the verge of tears she’s sick of shedding.
When she can tell she’ll soon be able to write no more, she tells Malon how she’s spent the last three years dreading growing into that body again, then drops the quill on the page. She withdraws into herself then, pulling her knees up to her chest and resting her forehead against them. Malon, still awake despite the late hour, stands next to her and reads the messy paragraphs she spilled in the candlelight. Numbly, Link feels Malon’s hand stroking her back as she reads. She feels how it shifts when she gets to certain parts, stilling for a brief moment or lifting slightly so her fingernails brush against her instead of her palm. At the very end, it comes to a rest on her shoulder just above where the burn she got from Majora starts, and squeezes.
“Come here,” Malon says, tugging gently at her. Link doesn’t move, until Malon guides her firmly up off the chair and into a hug. Malon holds her tight, and Link shakes in her embrace. “Maybe it won’t be so bad, if you grow into it normally instead of skipping right to it?”
Link can only shake her head. She dreads it like she dreaded walking up the stairs of Hyrule castle, and under the light of the full moon falling on her, it feels just as inevitable.
# # #
She wakes up the next morning in Malon’s bed, the sun only just starting to peek over the horizon. The cuccoos are surely only minutes away from crowing the rest of the ranch awake, but she’s still exhausted from last night, and rests her head back on the pillow for whatever precious bits of rest she can get.
The nightmares left her alone once she finally tumbled back to sleep, but in the light of morning, she remembers something.
Sheik introduced himself to her shortly after she left the sacred realm, and multiple times after before eventually revealing himself to be the princess of Hyrule.
It had been a disguise, at least ostensibly, but surely it would’ve been easier to hide herself as a Sheikah woman, rather than a man? His face could have been just as concealed by that scarf, and yet Sheik had gone the extra mile and transformed himself as radically as he could.
He was a narrow man, and on the shorter side, but Link would never have guessed that he was anything but. His voice was low and powerful, his chest bound down to nothing, his long hair arranged in a very neutral braid. Even after the disguise was discarded, Link could still see the way Sheik carried himself in Zelda’s movements.
That was the radical transformation she needed. Sheik had made himself unfamiliar, unrecognizable to the point where surely even the princess wouldn’t recognize herself in his mirror. Could Link do the same thing, before time ran out and she had to once again wear the body of an adult man?
The cuccoos wake, their overlapping calls washing over the ranch. Malon stirs beside her, stretching out her legs as the sound pulls her back into the waking world. She rubs at her eyes and lets out a protracted yawn before turning to Link, and offers a tight, worried smile. “You sleep okay?”
“Better,” she says, a faint rasp to her voice. “I have to go somewhere.”
Malon’s brow furrows. Link rarely goes anywhere unless she’s accompanying Malon. “Where?”
She almost says she was going to talk to the princess, but that thought dies before she can voice it. The princess never had need to become Sheik, and even so, seeking guidance on becoming a man is the opposite of what she needs. On the other hand, a rumor she overheard back on her journey wriggles her way back into her mind, clawing up from the grave she buried much of her adventure in until last night.
“The valley.”